Louise shook her head, glancing down at the phone she’d placed on the table in front of her, and then, in an agitated movement, folded her arms over herself. ‘No. I wasn’t sure I should.’

‘Well, I’d do that,’ O’Malley said, quietly. ‘You’ll feel better once you’ve talked about it.’

She didn’t look at his sympathetic smile, but instead angled her head to look towards the floor.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said.

Louise’s face seemed to grow, if anything, paler as she nodded. By the time O’Malley left, she’d made no move to pick up her phone.

Lightman had tried calling Louise’s friend April a few times with no joy. In the end he’d decided to drive over to her flat on Admirals Quay. It made up part of the very modern Ocean Village development on the dockside, and Lightman knew from having looked idly at the brochure once that the flats were well beyond his price range.

The ground floor was like a hotel. There was a bar, a concierge service, and a lift that you needed a key fob to operate. Lightman persuaded the concierge to rouse April Dumont and grant him access to the lift. The greying man leaned in and pressed the button for the top floor before inclining his head and turning away. The whole process made Lightman feel awkward.

It turned out that April’s flat actually occupied the whole of the top floor. He stepped out of the lift into a hallway with a single door. The space was lit in gold colours and featured what Lightman thought of as show-home furniture. It didn’t display many signs of anyone living there. This was an entirely different world from Louise Reakes’s solid suburban semi, and Lightman wondered what April did for a living.

The door opened before he’d got there, and a messy-haired blonde woman wearing a very short negligee with a silk dressing gown slung over it asked hoarsely, ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’m so sorry to wake you,’ he said, coming to stand a little in front of her. He felt the inevitable discomfort of standing in front of a woman wearing very little. So he did what he generally did and reduced the experience to a cataloguing one. He noted her accent, which had the drawl of an American from the deep south or Midwest. He saw the make-up smudged below her eyes. The glazed expression. The tattoo visible just above the line of the negligee. ‘I just need to ask two or three very brief questions about yesterday evening.’

‘Yesterday?’ April asked.

‘A young man was found dead in the garden of a house on Saints Close this morning,’ Lightman told her. ‘I believe you were there last night.’

‘What the hell?’ April asked. She stood back, suddenly, and said, ‘OK, come in for a second. It’s just me …’